Bcoin Protocol Gets Major Development Funding With New Agreement

When working with Bitcoin, decentralization is king. Purse CEO Andrew Lee, through bcoin, extends that logic to the Bitcoin protocol itself.

“For Bitcoin to take off, we need multiple implementations with even market share,” Lee explains in a Medium post. “Decentralizing protocol development will lead to multiple clients, diverse communities, more developers, better security and more innovation.”

So what is bcoin? Put simply, Bitcoin was written in C++ coding language, which has a steep learning curve and remains a bit out of reach for many developers. Bcoin helps to solve that problem by re-implementing Bitcoin in Javascript, arguably a more widely used language. This opens the door for more innovation in Bitcoin because more developers will be able to create apps and protocol improvements in Javascript instead of the more complex C++. In October of 2016, Purse announced that it would be running its online market service on top of bcoin.

An important feature of this new agreement is that the participants will gain no equity in any of the projects that arise from the funding. “Bitmain, Bitcoin.com, Bixin and F2Pool donated funds for a non-equity stake to specifically help with supporting the development of multiple implementations. Similar companies also donated to Parity (who is working on a Rust implementation of Bitcoin). The more client diversity Bitcoin has, the better,” explained Steven McKie, head of Growth & Product Content at Purse, in correspondence with Bitcoin Magazine. “Bcoin remains an independent project.”

As for how the funding will be allocated, McKie explains, “The funding will help directly with onboarding and training new developers to commit to the bcoin full-node implementation, open-source project.”

The timing of this announcement is important as it comes almost immediately after the announcement of the 2MBHF + SegWitSF agreement. According to McKie, “Bcoin will work to implement support for the 2MBHF + SegWitSF proposal into the codebase as we stated in our support for the proposal.” This funding agreement will go a long way toward helping that initiative.

“Bcoin is built for modularity and for developers to quickly be able to start utilizing Bitcoin’s robust global network and start hacking together useful tools and applications. Our full node is built on a stack that is attractive to as many developers as possible (node.js). Bcoin has support for all of Bitcoin’s latest features; it’s secure and production-tested by companies like Purse, BitPay, Bixin, Ripio and Bitwala — with more to come.”